Death to the Capitalist Roaders!

The Chinese have an expression that roughly translates as "kill the chicken to teach the monkey a lesson."

When I was in China in the early 1980s, the residue of the Cultural Revolution was palpable. Not only was the country impoverished, its cities run down and its people scraping by, but group-think and the secret police ruled the lives of most people. I got a call from the hotel manager once after the maid found a list of Chinese curse words and their English equivalents in my room. She promptly informed on me.

The advent of Chinese-style capitalism has meant that individual lives are better, though human rights continue to be something Chinese leaders say the country can't afford. I was sad to read how film star Jackie Chan thinks his countrymen and women are too emotional to have freedom and democracy. Jackie can say that because he's rich and lives wherever he wants.

One legacy of China's totalitarian history is a rough justice system known to mete out harsh punishments in order to elicit group adherence to the party line through fear and intimidation. Forced labor for those who think (and especially those who do) differently is common, along with executing those who damage the public welfare. The usual method is a bullet to the back of the head; a bill for said bullet is then sent to the executed's family.

This has been a bad period for unfettered free market Capitalism in many parts of the world from Wall Street to Tiananmen Square. The recent milk scandal in China showed their particular style of Capitalism run amok, with execs from several Chinese companies adding the plastic component melamine to various products from pet food to dairy items in order to bump up the protein content (melamine fools crude tests into registering a higher in quality). This wasn't a case of accidental contamination: the executives Geng Jinping, Zhang Yujun and Tian Wenhua, former Chairwoman of the dairy company Sanlu, deliberately added the melamine in order to juice their profits. The baby formula in particular sickened over 50,000 children and killed at least four of them.

As bad as the illness and deaths were, the resulting recall of Chinese dairy products and other foods made with Chinese milk by-products (chocolate, for one) has devastated China's commercial reputation and sent the world dairy market down at a time when milk-based drinks were being embraced all over Asia (a remarkable event, since most Asians are lactose-intolerant). So to send a message to other rogue capitalists ("teach the monkey a lesson"), Chinese courts have sentenced both men to death and the woman executive to hard time.

See above: the usual means of execution is a bullet in the back of the head. A bill for the bullet is then sent to the family of the deceased.

In this country, executives who commit these kinds of callous acts usually end up as consultants with golden parachutes.

photo courtesy of Capital Punishment UK